As New England has endured its snow bomb it’s been weirdly warm here in Seattle, where I live, just as it was when I was at the Harvard Forest writing Witness Tree in the winter of 2014-15. We had snowmageddon at the Harvard Forest while back home people were cutting the grass by March. This year seems to be headed in a similar direction, friends are already hearing spring frogs south of us and the daffodils are up four inches. The witch hazel in our front garden is in full bloom.

The big oak has made it through the bomb cyclone and I’m glad for that!I’d show you the picture on the Witness Tree web cam at the Harvard Forest of it standing tall…but the cover over the camera is covered with snow! As it should be.

Meanwhile tree stories continue to fascinate me. Here is a piece I wrote in the Seattle Times last week about the death of a beautiful, old American elm. It stood for a century and now only its mate remains, its crown holding the shape of the departed. As in any long marriage, they formed one another and the remaining elm shows the reach of its mate’s arms, where they stood together side by side, for so long.

The remaining elm shows the shape of its departed mate, on the left side of the crown. It shows the reach of the arms of the tree it stood next to, for so long. (That’s Mount Rainier, in the background.) Credit: Ken Lambert, The Seattle Times

As elsewhere, the elm had been maintained with expensive injections of anti-fungal treatment to stave off Dutch Elm Disease, and was perfectly healthy. But the soil became so saturated in one of our famous Seattle winter rains that a winter wind storm at the stub end of the year blew it right over.

One of the things that made that big elm so special was its crown tumbled in green tresses all the way to the ground. So people could touch and know the canopy even of a very big tree.

Here it is, still standing with its mate, as it received what turned out to be its last treatment.

The elm on the left was toppled in a wind storm. It was one of the largest American elms left in Seattle’s city parks and sustained with anti fungal treatments, such as it is receiving here. Photo by Deborah Brown McGarry.

So that is how it is with trees. They enter our lives, then our hearts, and stay there. One of the joys of writing Witness Tree is how many people have sent me photographs of favorite trees, very often trees they grew up with as children. I treasure these stories. You are invited to send me yours: lmapes@seattletimes.com

May 31, 2017

“The intriguing, and more intimate, WITNESS TREE: Seasons of Change With a Century-Old Oak (Bloomsbury, $27), by Lynda V. Mapes, portrays trees as “scribes, diarists, historians.” They are “among our oldest journalists.” A reporter herself, covering environmental issues for The Seattle Times, Mapes sets out to tell the story of climate change through one tree. But that is, marvelously, the least of it.

She finds her oak in the Harvard Forest in Massachusetts and spends a year with it, telling of the farm on which it grew, twisting up out of a stone wall, and drawing forth people devoted to befriending and studying trees. They are the tree’s interpreters. Bob Leverett, a former Air Force engineer and a “committed big-tree hunter,” arrives to take measurements and tells Mapes, “I need trees for my emotional stability and health.” He bemoans all we have lost in the destruction of ancient forests: “We have robbed a species of its dignity.”

Mapes is a graceful writer. She describes “the quiet finesse” of a tree; “the fructifying funk” at the base of an oak; the “wand of time” that is a core sample drilled out to ascertain age; the “choring and the weariness” in the diary of a 19th-century farmer’s wife; a spider that has “rappelled gracefully” off her glasses. She is spending so much time with her tree that it’s becoming a part of her; she sheds it only when she goes indoors at night.

As for the vexing (if not terrifying) prospect of global warming, there’s no question in any gardener or farmer or arborist’s mind: Leaf-out starts earlier than ever before and first frost comes later as average temperatures rise steadily across the land. This isn’t a matter of belief; it’s observable fact. With that change in rhythm, and a weather system on steroids, come a host of problems. As Mapes puts it: “Leaves don’t lie; frost isn’t running for office; frogs don’t fund-raise; pollinators don’t put out press releases.”

The natural world is an unimpeachable witness, and we would be wise to heed its testimony. “We are not separate from nature,” Mapes writes, and in this she echoes what the artists and scientists and gardeners are telling us too. “We are of it, and in it, and we need an ethical framework to match.”

Delighted to see the book get this national recognition for the second time, the book review also gave Witness Tree a lovely mention in the spring books guide.

The Witness Tree, captured on the Harvard Forest web cam at its feet this morning, May 31. Notice the rain drops on the camera cover. The tree is now in its glorious green gown of leaves, ready to work for another season.

May 27, 2017

How honored I was to be the first author to present from the new lectern at the Arnold Arboretum fashioned from a walnut tree in its collection that had to be cut.

Me on launch day May 5 at the Arnold Arboretum on the black walnut that gave its life for the lectern, and a beautiful new conference table at the Arnold Arboretum. Note that it’s also got a new life all its own, in the new shoot burgeoning from its stump. Photo by Pamela Thompson

The tree survived minimal hurricane damage in 1985, and a lightning strike. A shoot is now growing from the remaining stump. And its life at the arboretum continues. For one, the tree’s uniquely beautiful wood has been fashioned into a new lectern for presentations at the fine gathering space in the visitors center at the Hunnewell Building at the arboretum.

Made from black walnut (Juglans nigra) by Pergola Construction of Swampscott, MA., the lectern is just one new life and purpose for the tree, accession number 14761*A, received as a plant in Dec 1893 from Thos. Meehan and Sons Nursery in Germantown, PA.

I was thrilled to read at the lectern — the first presenter to have the honor — during the launch for Witness Tree so graciously hosted by the arboretum May 5.

With Pam Thompson, left, manager of adult education at the Arnold Arboretum, and a copy of Witness Tree the night of the big launch, the first at the new lectern. And what beauty it is! Photo by Richard Maddocks.

One of the joys about the arboretum is the history in each named, numbered and tracked tree and shrub in the collection. I think director William (Ned) Friedman knows each one as an individual. On a visit to the arboretum earlier this week the two of us roamed the rain-soaked grounds for hours and it was a joy to watch him exclaim in the wonders unfolding as spring coaxed out new leaves and flowers in profusion. No administrator stuck behind a desk, Friedman makes a point of visiting the collection, photographing it, blogging about it, and knowing the condition of the grounds and plants up close, and personally.

Ned Friedman, director of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, savoring the bloom on a horse chestnut. The collection was in peak flower during my visit May 22nd and a sight not to be missed.

But that is not the end of the story on the black walnut. When I came back to the arboretum that day after our ramble around the grounds Dr. Friedman showed me the new conference table, delivered just that day at the arboretum’s Weld Hill Research Building. What a glory that table is: silky smooth to the touch, grand, with every bit of grain and beauty revealed, it is a gift not only to the present, but the future.

The new conference table made from the same black walnut, shown off by Ned Friedman, arboretum director, and Faye Rosin, director, research facilitation.

And speaking of the Arboretum…be sure to read my story about the story behind my book Witness Tree, just published in the current edition, Vol. 74, No. 4 of Arnoldia, the science magazine of the Arboretum. Thanks to editor Nancy Rose for doing such a nice job with the story.

Meanwhile there is news in the woods, too. Leaves! After an on again, off again spring that was both hot and cold, the big oak is finally resplendent in its new robe of leaves at the Harvard Forest. How beautiful to see when I clicked on the Harvard Forest’s web cam under the tree this morning from my study in Seattle, just to see how things were progressing. Ah, the pleasure of long distance phenology! Spring, with no black flies.

Here is the webcam photo from the Witness Tree Cam at the Harvard Forest from this morning, May 18. Spring has finally truly sprung.

May 12, 2017

Thanks to Carrie Healy of New England Public Radio who put up this great story today on New England Public Radio. She made the trip out to the Harvard Forest to interview me under the big oak and talk about the Witness Tree project. I love the sounds of us walking up to the tree and the spring birds calling as we talked!

Full of laughter and joy, she was a reporter who clearly got the unique setting of the Harvard Forest and the message of the book. What a pleasure to spend that time together.

Carrie Healy of New England Public Radio interviewing me by the big oak, web cams at our feet. Photo by Doug MacDonald

Larissa Glasser, library assistant at the horticultural library of the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University about to tuck Witness Tree into the permanent collection.

Now, for authors, really truly it doesn’t get much better than that, especially this author. My career as a writer was launched as a reader, tagging along with my mother to the public library in Chappaqua, New York, where she would gather stacks of reading, and I would race down to the children’s section to do the same. Out we would come to her station wagon, loaded down with books ready for a nice long read.

Witness Tree has great company on the natural history shelf at the horticultural library at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University

I had my own library card from earliest age and could check out as many books as I wanted. Every birthday meant a new hard cover book. And libraries have been my haven since those early childhood days. Fast forward to publication of Witness Tree on April 11, launched at the Seattle Public Library and hosted by the Seattle Public Library Foundation among other partners. What an honor to be feted that night in that beautiful public gathering place for learning and discovery.

What an honor to sign Witness Tree to the horticultural library at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University.

Such beautiful book plates at the Arnold Arboretum’s horticultural library! Dressing up Witness Tree.

And now, to watch Witness Tree get its barcode, label, and bookplate, to sign it with a flourish and see Larissa climb the book ladder to tuck it on the natural history shelf…right next to Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac and Berndt Heinrich’s The Trees in My Forest — two books that inspired me in writing Witness Tree, how very wonderful indeed.

Particularly in this library. It’s open to the pubic, and even smells just as a library should: like old wood and books. Windows and views to the arboretum beyond make for a luscious setting, and the grand library table, so big it was built in place, and dating to 1892 make work here a special pleasure.

I don’t have a window in the cubical I inhabit in our mouse-infested mayhem of the newsroom at the Seattle Times, where I am the environmental reporter. It will be nice, when back at work to think of Witness Tree on these beautiful shelves, in this gracious room, with its vast library table and the swell little wooden ladder for climbing the floor-to- ceiling shelves. The soft light from the bubbly old glass windows, the grandeur of this salon of books. Ah yes. How wonderful indeed. But better yet, I like to think of Witness Tree checked out, busy in the world, with readers flocking to libraries, for wonder and discovery.

April 11, 2017

A little DIY (Do It Yourself) press this Sunday in the Pacific Magazine of the Seattle Times. How lovely to see the tree in newspaper boxes all over Seattle. I wrote this piece using photographs from my time at the Harvard Forest and recounted my time climbing the tree. Was lovely to relive it all over again!

April 8, 2017

Just as the buds finally start opening on the trees, the buzz is building for the launch for Witness Tree. I’ll be kicking off a spring series of parties and readings on both coasts beginning at the downtown branch of the Seattle Public Library Tuesday April 11 at 7 pm. 1000 4th Ave. Seattle area friends, hope to see you there! Boston and Petersham friends, I’ll be there for readings at the Harvard Forest May 2 at 7 pm and at Arnold Arboretum May 5 at 6 pm. Meanwhile, I went on Q13 Fox this morning to talk about the book. Enjoy this short clip!